123rd Festival of Frugality

The Festival of Frugality is up at Sound Money Matters. Lots of good ideas and entertaining reading. I completely agree with Money Blue Book’s post about higher gas prices (hopefully) leading to a decrease in the number of cars on the road. I will always walk or bike if it’s a reasonable alternative. If I’m going to my parents’ house 75 miles away, I’ll drive. But if I’m going to the bank 4 miles from our house, I bike. And the majority of the errands I run are within a five mile radius. The 75 mile trips are very infrequent. But the one or two mile trips happen all the time. So walking or biking really does add up in the long run. It’s very frustrating to me to see people in my neighborhood driving their SUVs to their jobs that are less than two miles from home. I’m very hopeful that higher gas prices will make people really think about when they need to drive and when they could use an alternate way of getting from A to B.

I also liked Save and Conquer’s post about taking care of your own health at home. I go to the doctor once a year for a checkup, and that’s it. I’ve never been to the doctor for anything other than a physical (although I did go to an oral surgeon to have my wisdom teeth removed several years ago). With our pregnancy, I’ve been seeing a midwife and we’ll be having a home birth with the midwives in attendance. We’re lucky to both be healthy, although we go to great lengths to keep ourselves that way. We almost never get sick, but every few years one of us will get a cold. It would never occur to either of us to go to the doctor for a cold, but I’m always amazed by how many people schedule a doctor visit at the first sign of a sniffle. We also have a high-deductible ($3000) health insurance policy with an HSA, so we’re motivated to spend our health care dollars wisely. My husband had knee surgery a few months ago, which meant we had to meet our deductible. We didn’t mind though, because there was nothing we could do on our own to fix his knee. But for minor ailments, a little time, patience, good food, exercise, and rest will usually do wonders.

Funny About Money has a great post about cost-efficient home improvements. Hard flooring throughout the house and xeriscaping are two projects that we’ve done in the last year, and I couldn’t agree more about all the benefits. All of our floors are now either wood, laminate, vinyl, or tile. Everything can be swept and mopped in a flash. Dog and cat hair (and the occasional cat puke) are no problem now. And our yard looks great with very little fuss and almost no watering. Both projects were definitely worth the effort.

Thank you for all your inspiration! We are in the process of shopping for new medical insurance because of my husbands job change. I keep coming back to your posts on HSA’s. Can you tell me why you chose an HSA over traditional insurance. I keep thinking this may be a better fit for us.
Thanks!

Lisa,
An HSA made sense for us for lots of reasons. We’re both healthy and almost never need medical care. So the idea of paying for our own care before the deductible wasn’t a big deal. We felt comfortable with a $3000 deductible, but wanted 100% coverage after that in case of a serious incident – our HSA provides that. My husband’s knee surgery cost us $3000, but since we met the deductible, all of the bills have been paid by the insurance. So it’s easy to plan financially for worst-case scenarios. Also, we wanted to be able to set up an HSA and use it as a backup retirement plan. We’ve maxxed it out the last two years in a row, and even though we’ve pulled out quite a bit of money to pay for my husband’s knee and our midwife, we still have several thousand dollars in the account. Next year we’ll max it out again and hopefully won’t need to take any more money out. So going forward, the account will just keep growing, tax deferred. Also, by choosing an HSA qualified health insurance plan without copays for small stuff, we get some of the lowest premiums available for health insurance. We would rather pay a lower amount month after month and take our chances on not having to meet the deductible very often (taking really good care of your health helps with this), instead of paying sky-high premiums in order to have a low deductible policy. The math just makes more sense that way. Good luck with finding a policy that works for you!